Vanguard in action as multiple hardware bans are handed to League of Legends cheaters

League of Legends recently incorporated Valorant’s kernel-level anti-cheat Vanguard now resulting in one of the first hardware ban waves for the game, taking down some of the nastiest cheaters in the high-ranking lobby as per Phillip Koskinas, head of anti-cheat at Riot Games.

In his brief post, he revealed the amount of bans Vanguard have handed out, of which, we can see a fair amount of hardware bans for cheaters using paid cheating applications that can read client memory to launch scripts to dodge attacks.

ban printer's warming up pic.twitter.com/IeFA4rUKKh

— Phillip Koskinas (@deteccphilippe) May 20, 2024

League dev teams also clarify that the Vanguard is helping to fight undetected cheaters. “Now that Vanguard has had a bit of time to roll out, we're starting to target more cheats that we weren't able to action on in the past. These new waves also will come with League's first ever Hardware ID bans, increasing the action weight against cheaters,” the official post wrote.

Direct counter to cheaters ruining games

Cheaters are quite common in high-ranking lobbies for any multiplayer game to feel superior to other players. Koskinas also revealed that a lot of players banned were also among master or higher ranks. Even AntiCheatPD on X reported that cheaters are now asking for a refund for the cheats.

Vanguard has initiated a large ban wave targeting a League of Legends provider, and cheaters are just realising that this time, it includes an HWID ban.



Here is an album of their tears enjoy! https://t.co/GECWNAL19B pic.twitter.com/k1dc3tipSp

— Anti-Cheat Police Department 🕵️ (@AntiCheatPD) May 20, 2024

This further shows how effective Vanguard has been for the cheating problem in games developed by Riot. Handing hardware bans also prevents cheaters from playing the game on the same device, and while one can still hardware spoof, it's too much of a time-sink to get banned shortly after.

However, Vanguard works on the kernel level, meaning it has full access to any PC and runs on boot, which has made some players sceptical. Most recently, players were even complaining that the anti-cheat update bricked some of the systems. While there was no solid proof that the anti-cheat was the one responsible, the developers also announced that they will be helping players troubleshoot the issue.